Statistics, Department of
The R Journal
Date of this Version
12-2017
Document Type
Article
Citation
The R Journal (December 2017) 9(2); Editor: Roger Bivand
Abstract
The USA National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) is one of the world’s most important sources of biological information. NCBI databases like PubMed and GenBank contain mil lions of records describing bibliographic, genetic, genomic, and medical data. Here I present rentrez, a package which provides an R interface to 50 NCBI databases. The package is well-documented, contains an extensive suite of unit tests and has an active user base. The programmatic interface to the NCBI provided by rentrez allows researchers to query databases and download or import particular records into R sessions for subsequent analysis. The complete nature of the package, its extensive test-suite and the fact the package implements the NCBI’s usage policies all make rentrez a powerful aid to developers of new packages that perform more specific tasks.
Included in
Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing Commons, Programming Languages and Compilers Commons
Comments
Copyright 2017, The R Foundation. Open access material. License: CC BY 4.0